In addition to prisoners of war, thousands of Ukrainian citizens are being held in Russia, and hundreds of Russian citizens have been jailed for opposing the war. No real and lasting peace can be achieved if these people are left behind, since failure to grant them justice will signal approval of continued Russian repression and imperialist aggression.

Oleksandra Matviichuk and Oleg Orlov, joint laureates of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize have co-founded “People First”, an international campaign to focus attention on the needs of thousands of civilians whose lives have been compromised in the conflict. Orlov warns that “If peace is achieved as a result of the collusion of elites, namely Trump and Putin, this will fortify the fascist regime in Russia for many years to come.”

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Ukrainian sources claim that nearly 20,000 children have been forcibly removed to Russia, although an exact number is impossible to determine. In occupied territories Russian forces have undertaken a process of “filtration” to test inhabitants for loyalty to the regime. If parents fail this test, their children are declared to be “abandoned without parental care” and removed to camps and foster families.

Their names and birth records are often changed, making them almost impossible to locate, especially small children who cannot confirm their identity.

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The people who might be overlooked in a peace deal are not just abstract statistics. Each one has a personal story.

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Irina Navalnaya, an IT specialist, is 27 years old, a citizen of Ukraine. When she and her mother evacuated from their home in Mariupol at the beginning of the full-scale war, they were forced to undergo “filtration” by the Russian police who harassed Irina because of her last name (by chance the same as that of Aleksei Navalny) and even put a gun to her head.

A few months later she returned to check on her grandmother and collect some of her belongings. She was arrested while riding her bicycle and taken to the police department where she was beaten.

After a month of torture at an undisclosed location, to save her life she “confessed” to planning a terrorist attack. Memorial considers the case against her to be a fabrication. She is now serving an 8-year sentence in a penal colony not far from Rostov-on-Don, Russia.

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Mariia Ponomarenko is 46 years old, has two young children, and until April 2022 she worked as a journalist for the electronic newspaper RusNews in Barnaul, Russia.

Her “crime” was a description of the attack of the Russian air force on a theatre in Mariupol, where hundreds of civilians died, an event that was widely reported internationally.

Mariia has been sentenced to 6 years in a penal colony in her hometown of Barnaul in Siberia, where they are currently threatening to add another 2 years to her sentence. She has been subjected to forced psychiatric treatment and denied needed medical help.

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